JUNEAU, Alaska – President-elect Donald Trump promised repeatedly during his campaign to expand oil drilling in the U.S., which is good news for political leaders in Alaska, where oil is the economic lifeblood and many felt the Biden administration has obstructed efforts to boost the state's diminished production.
A debate over drilling on federal lands on Alaska's petroleum-rich North Slope will likely be revived in the coming months, particularly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which environmentalists have long sought to protect as one of the country's last wild places.
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The question of drilling on the refuge's coastal plain, as Trump sought to do during his first term, also divides Alaska Native communities. Some welcome the potential new revenue while others worry about how it will impact wildlife in an area they consider sacred.
What is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?
The largest wildlife refuge in the country covers an area of northeast Alaska roughly the size of South Carolina. It boasts a diverse landscape of mountains and glaciers, tundra plains, rivers and boreal forest, and is home to a variety of wildlife including polar bears, caribou, musk ox and birds.
The fight over whether to drill in the refuge's coastal plain along the Beaufort Sea goes back decades. Drilling advocates say development could create thousands of jobs, generate billions of dollars in revenue, and spur U.S. oil production.
While the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has said the coastal plain could contain 4.25 billion to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, there is limited information about the amount and quality of oil. And it's unclear whether companies will want to risk pursuing projects that could become mired in litigation. Environmentalists and climate scientists have pushed for a phase-out of fossil fuels to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
The refuge is east of the oil fields in Prudhoe Bay and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, where the Biden administration approved the controversial Willow oil project but also made about half the petroleum reserve off-limits to oil and gas leasing.
Have there been efforts to drill in the refuge?
An exploration well was drilled in the 1980s on lands where Alaska Native corporations held rights, but little information has been released about the results.
Still, opening the coastal plain to drilling has been a longtime goal for members of Alaska's congressional delegation. In 2017, they added language to a tax bill mandating two oil and gas lease sales by late 2024.
The first sale took place in the waning days of the last Trump administration, but President Joe Biden quickly called on Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to review the leasing program.
That led to the cancelation of seven leases that had been acquired by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state corporation. Smaller companies gave up two other leases. Litigation is pending over the canceled leases.
The Biden administration recently released a new environmental review, ahead of the deadline for the second required sale. It proposes offering what the Bureau of Land Management said would be the minimum acreage the 2017 law allows — a proposal Alaska’s Republican U.S. senators cast as a mockery of the law meant to encourage exploration.
What do Alaska Natives want?
There are sharp divisions.
Leaders of the Iñupiaq community of Kaktovik, which is within the refuge, support drilling. Gwich’in officials in communities near the refuge have said they consider the coastal plain sacred. Caribou they rely on calve there.
Galen Gilbert, first chief of Arctic Village Council, said the refuge should be off-limits to drilling. Arctic Village is a Neets’aii Gwich’in community.
“We don’t want to bother anybody. We don’t want anything. We just want our way of life, not only for us, but for our future generations,” Gilbert said.
Leaders in Kaktovik have vowed to fight any attempt by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate the lands as sacred. Josiah Patkotak, mayor of the North Slope Borough, which includes Kaktovik, said in an October opinion piece that the land “has never been” Gwich’in territory.
“The federal government must understand that any attempt to undermine our sovereignty will be met with fierce resistance,” he wrote.
Oil is vital to the economic wellbeing of North Slope communities, said Nagruk Harcharek, president of Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a nonprofit advocacy group whose members include leaders from that region. Responsible development has long coexisted with subsistence lifestyles, he said.
After Trump's election, what might change?
In a video posted on X by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Trump said he would work to ensure a natural gas pipeline project long sought by state political leaders is built. The project, opposed by environmentalists, has floundered over the years due to changes in direction under various governors, cost concerns and other factors.
While voters “might not have been head over heels” for Trump, “they appreciated that his policies, when they come to resource development, are clearly policies that work to benefit an economy like Alaska’s,” Trump critic U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski told reporters.
“So I would anticipate that we would see, again, a return to greater economic opportunities through resource development,” she said.
Dunleavy said Trump could undo restrictions imposed by the Biden administration on new oil and gas leasing on 13 million acres (5.3 million hectares) of the petroleum reserve. Harcharek's group sued over the restrictions, arguing that the region's elected leaders had been ignored.
Erik Grafe, an attorney for Earthjustice in Alaska, said the petroleum reserve was not set aside “to get oil out at all costs.” Other important resources must be considered and afforded protections under the law, he said.
“Oil is not the future and it can’t be," Grafe said. "The state needs to start thinking of a Plan B, post-oil.”